Hey,
short introduction…I´m a 3ds max generalist at a small company in Hamburg germany, doing mostly medical animations and some commercials.
About two years ago I started a shortfilm/music video about tardigrades as a fun side project and to further my skillset beyond what I do at my job.
Biggest issue for me was character animation, so I decided to start a collaboration, with artella.com at the core, providing both the online cloud storage as well as a community of fresh talents willing to work on a passion project like this.
Since most animators seem to start with maya, I figured I could have rigging and animation done in Maya and bring everything back via alembic to 3ds Max.
So far so good, everything started well, but then my first rigger dropped out.
Since I have no budget, I had a hard time finding a replacement and soon after I found it, that one dropped out on me as well. I had two more riggers come in who were not able to finish the rig, either due to time issues or lack of skills.
So now, even though I still managed to complete about 25%, I stil don´t have a production ready rig and I was starting to really regret my first decision.
I´m not an expert rigger, but I could have completed the rig in 3ds max in a couple of weeks max…
I get that there is limited demographic willing to donate their time - mostly students, some freshy graduates, people in between jobs, looking to fill their portfolio, some like me wanting to try something new and the occasional tardigrade afficionado…
I´m just afraid if I switch to 3ds max, I will have an even harder time finding character animators for 3ds max, than finding a rigger for maya…
So, TL;DR:
Last call…any Maya riggers interested…?
I´m planning on a kickstarter further down the road, but that shouldn´t be the main incentive…
This is the little fella in question:
You can also check out our website:
facebook:
facebook.com/journeyofthewaterbear
Or apply directly here:
https://www.artella.com/project/d0ffefa0-b9b6-4b32-b452-4e8260f73a5f
I´ve also looked into ways to convert a 3ds Max to Maya, but even though there are plenty of companies using both in their pipeline, there seems to be no way to do that.